Yekl A Tale of the New York Ghetto By A. Cahan New York D. Appleton and Company 1896 COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. CONTENTS. I.--JAKE AND YEKL II.--THE NEW YORK GHETTO III.--IN THE GRIP OF HIS PAST IV.--THE MEETING V.--A PATERFAMILIAS VI.--CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES VII.--MRS. KAVARSKY'S COUP D'ÉTAT VIII.--A HOUSETOP IDYL IX.--THE PARTING X.--A DEFEATED VICTOR YEKL. CHAPTER I. JAKE AND YEKL. The operatives of the cloak-shop in which Jake was employed had been idle all the morning. It was after twelve o'clock and the "boss" had not yet returned from Broadway, whither he had betaken himself two or three hours before in quest of work. The little sweltering assemblage--for it was an oppressive day in midsummer--beguiled their suspense variously. A rabbinical-looking man of thirty, who sat with the back of his chair tilted against his sewing machine, was intent upon an English newspaper. Every little while he would remove it from his eyes--showing a dyspeptic face fringed with a thin growth of dark beard--to consult the cumbrous dictionary on his knees. Two young lads, one seated on the frame of the next machine and the other standing, were boasting to one another of their respective intimacies with the leading actors of the Jewish stage. The board of a third machine, in a corner of the same wall, supported an open copy of a socialist magazine in Yiddish, over which a cadaverous young man absorbedly swayed to and fro droning in the Talmudical intonation. A middle-aged operative, with huge red side whiskers, who was perched on the presser's table in the corner opposite, was mending his own coat. While the thick-set presser and all the three women of the shop, occupying the three machines ranged against an adjoining wall, formed an attentive audience to an impromptu lecture upon the comparative merits of Boston and New York by Jake. He had been speaking for some time. He stood in the middle of the overcrowded stuffy room with his long but well-shaped legs wide apart, his bulky round head aslant, and one of his bared mighty arms akimbo. He spoke in Boston Yiddish, that is to say, in Yiddish more copiously spiced with mutilated English than is the language of the metropolitan Ghetto in which our story lies. He had a deep and rather harsh voice, and his r's could do credit to the thickest Irish brogue. "When I was in Boston," he went on, with a contemptuous mien intended for the American metropolis, "I knew a _feller_,[1] so he was a _preticly_ friend of John Shullivan's. He is a Christian, that feller is, and yet the two of us lived like brothers. May I be unable to move from this spot if we did not. How, then, would you have it? Like here, in New York, where the Jews are a _lot_ of _greenhornsh_ and can not speak a word of English? Over there every Jew speaks English like a stream."